Alejandro G. Inarritu answers critics of his new film: 'There's a kind of racist undercurrent'

TELLURIDE, Colo. — Everything about Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's new film is on a big scale. The themes and ideas — involving identity, Mexican history, race, success, family and mortality — are big. The level of cinematic ambition is big. Even the complete title — "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths" — is a lot to wrap your head around.

But sometimes the bigger they come, the harder they fall — and in its initial showings at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, the hotly anticipated "Bardo" has gotten off to a rather rough start.

A phantasmagoric and surrealistic tour through the memories, dreams and existential anxieties of a famous Mexican journalist-turned-filmmaker named Silverio Gama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), "Bardo" represents above all a journey of personal exploration for Inarritu. Named after the Buddhist concept of a limbo between death and rebirth, "Bardo" deconstructs the complex and fraught identity of a Mexican immigrant who, like Inarritu himself, relocated his family to the United States for the sake of his career and achieved tremendous success, only to find himself feeling like a man without a country.

Any Inarritu project arrives with a formidable pedigree, which Netflix — releasing "Bardo" in Mexico on Oct. 27 and select